Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

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1.
I’ve been on the Internet since I was fourteen years old. I’ve always loved it here. But a few months back, I found myself a bit troubled by what I perceived to be a difference in the way my mind was working. I would be at my desk writing and then I’d be on Twitter or Gmail or CNN, with no clear recollection of having decided to drop one task and switch to another. It was as if my brain, craving stimulation beyond the meticulous working out of plot issues, had jumped to a new task of its own accord. I wasn’t always this distractible.

The problem reminded me of muscle memory. I used to be a dancer, and my training was intense. After a certain amount of physical training, either in dance or in athletics, certain actions become almost unconscious. After all these years away from dance I can still assume a perfect arabesque line. I have a visceral memory of exactly what a triple pirouette feels like, the precise coordination and timing required, although I doubt very much that I could execute one anymore.

I began to realize that after all this time on the Internet, I’d trained my brain to expect a new stimulation every few minutes. After a short period of concentration on a given task, my brain would do what I’d trained it to do: it would turn its attention to something else. Concentrating on a single task for an extended period of time—as is required when one’s reading a book, for instance, or writing one—had become unsettlingly difficult.

I only occasionally read non-fiction, but I was struck by Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains from the moment I saw the title on a bookstore shelf. Carr describes the same phenomenon in his own life. “Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense,” he writes,

that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or lengthy article… Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel like I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Internet, he writes, is a system that might as well have been designed to foster distractedness. When you’re reading a book it’s easy to sink into the text—what Carr calls deep reading—for long periods. There’s nothing in that medium but the text itself. Reading on the Internet is a different matter. The Web is designed to allow you to move rapidly between interlinked pages, but even if you don’t click a link every few minutes, this is an arena of constant distractions. Even if one of those infernal pop-ups doesn’t float across your screen and demand your attention, even if there aren’t two or three animated banner ads flashing their messages above and to the side of the text you’re reading, there are usually links embedded in the text itself, and the second or two it takes to evaluate whether or not the link’s worth following forces a break in your concentration. In the meantime, you’re waiting for two or three important emails, and it’s been a few minutes since you last checked Twitter or Facebook, and what’s the weather supposed to be like later? Your brain is constantly switching tasks.

Neuroplasticity is the process by which the brain changes in response to experience. The human brain remains plastic, which is to say malleable, throughout our adult lives, meaning that new connections between neural cells are continually being forged. The changes wrought by neuroplasticity aren’t trivial; a famous 1990s study of London cab drivers (cited in this book) found that cabbies who’d been navigating London’s complex street system for two years or longer displayed a measurable increase in the size of the posterior hippocampus, a section of the brain associated with spatial memory, and that the longer a cabbie had been driving, the larger this part of the brain tended to be.

The advantages to this structural flexibility are obvious. Your brain is somewhat less plastic now than it was when you were a child, but it’s never too late to learn another language, or the street grid of a new city, or how to program an Excel spreadsheet. As you gain expertise in your new skills, new connections are forged and existing connections strengthened.

a loophole for free thought and free will, it also imposes its own form of determinism on our behavior. As particular circuits in our brain strengthen through the repetition of physical or mental activity, they begin to transform that activity into a habit.

The paradox of neuroplasticity, observes [the research psychiatrist Charles] Doidge, is that for all the mental flexibility it grants us, it can end up locking us into ‘rigid behaviors’. The chemically triggered synapses that link our neurons program us, in effect, to want to keep exercising the circuits they’ve formed.

In other words, if you’ve spent so much time online that you’re accustomed to focusing on something new every few minutes, you might have a hard time reading deeply for long periods of time without checking your BlackBerry, or writing uninterrupted at your desk without wandering into Twitter. As you continue to switch rapidly between tasks, the neural connections that have developed in response to this behavior continue to strengthen, while unused circuits weaken and fall away. Your brain is continually fine-tuning itself. “This doesn’t mean that we can’t,” Carr writes,

with concerted effort, once again redirect our neural signals and rebuild the skills we’ve lost. What it does mean is that the vital paths in our brains become … the paths of least resistance. They are the paths that most of us will take most of the time, and the farther we proceed down them, the more difficult it is to turn back.

The Internet has trained us. Which is to say, of course, that we’ve trained ourselves, since the Web is the most human of endeavors; we code the Web and we design its flashing graphics, we write its content and speak to one another through its zeros and ones. We’ve created an ever-more-speedy experience, and we’ve adapted to that speed. “Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to,” Carr writes. “Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements.”

Both statements, of course, apply to the Internet.

2.
Carr has a weakness, here and there, for telling us what we already know. (“The ability to exchange information online, to upload as well as download, has turned the Net into a thoroughfare for business and commerce.”) There’s an unsettling inclusion, in the midst of far sounder studies, of what looks to me like junk science: a 2008 Adweek magazine study that followed four (4) typical Americans for a day and noted that what they all had in common was that none of them opened a book. Four isn’t a persuasive sample size.

He makes a couple of assumptions that I disagree with, most notably in a discussion of the ways in which a gradual shift from printed books to ebooks might change the way authors view their work, given the impermanence of electronic text:

Even after an ebook is downloaded into a networked device, it can be easily and automatically updated… It seems likely that removing the sense of closure from book writing will, in time, alter writers’ attitudes toward their work. The pressure to achieve perfection will diminish, along with the artistic rigor that the pressure imposed.

To which I can only reply: try writing for the Internet. (He does in fact write for the Internet; he must just experience it differently than I do.) Any mistake I make in a piece published online will be immediately pointed out to me in the comments section, with varying degrees of helpfulness or malice. Yes, I can log into WordPress and fix the mistake, but the cost of imperfection is public embarrassment, and the sharp-edged business of publishing books is genteel by comparison.

But by and large, I found The Shallows to be a persuasive and interesting work. The New York Times, however, was unconvinced.

3.Jonah Lehrer began his career as a scientist. He was a double major in neuroscience and English, and spent some years as a technician in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Eric Kandel. He’s gone on to distinguish himself as a science writer. In his New York Times review of The Shallows, he notes that “[t]here is little doubt that the Internet is changing our brain.

Everything changes our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is that the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to “marked increases in the speed of information processing.”

Being able to process information quickly is useful, but it doesn’t quite negate Carr’s thesis, which is that the neurological changes brought about by Internet usage can erode our ability to focus deeply for prolonged periods and that this has implications for society at large. What the video game studies (pdf) suggest is that gameplay—which Carr views as a useful proxy for certain aspects of Web use—can “induce a general speeding of perceptual reaction times without decreases in accuracy of performance.” Or as Carr puts it, “video game playing improves performance on tasks that require rapid shifts of visual attention. Clearly, an important benefit, but hardly a proxy for deep, critical, or conceptual thinking.”

Toward the end of The Shallows, Carr discusses a study that measured concentration and attentiveness in people who, before they were subjected to the researchers’ tests, spent an hour walking in a woodland park; they performed much better than a group who spent an hour walking on a busy downtown street.

Walking on an urban street is certainly analogous to the experience of spending time on the Internet: a chaos of bright lights and fleeting interactions and fast movement, stimulating and by turns interesting and banal. In the course of an impressively gentlemanly post-New York Times review debate on Jonah Lehrer’s blog, Carr wrote that “[w]e love the city street and the web for many good reasons, but we should also be aware that that they aren’t conducive to some of the deepest—and to me most valuable—forms of thought our brains are capable of.”

I followed Lehrer and Carr’s discussion, and what I found most interesting about it—aside from the sheer civility of discourse, which made me long for a magical alternate-universe version of the Internet where everyone’s reasonable and trolls don’t exist—was that no clear victor emerged. Both have considerable evidence at their disposal to back up their points of view.

But there, in the quote above: to me most valuable. The point, it seems to me, isn’t whether the Internet is “good” or “bad” for our brains. The Internet has changed us, just as the printed book and the typewriter did. The Internet sharpens us and makes us faster thinkers, more adept at shifting between tasks, even as it erodes our ability to focus on a single topic, a single work, for long periods of time. The point is that whether you think the Internet is “good for your mind”, or exactly the opposite, depends on your values.

I wouldn’t want to give up the sheer vertiginous over-stimulation of walking down a Manhattan street, any more than I’d want to give up the Internet. I live in a metropolis for a reason. But what if your work depends on the ability to fall into a state of deep focus for long periods?

Carr is the author of two other books, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications. His degrees are in literature and language. Although he’s done his research, it seems to me that he’s approached this problem primarily as a writer—in other words, as someone whose profession requires the ability to close oneself in a room and remain utterly focused on the business of researching and completing a manuscript for hours at a time. For a writer, an inability to focus for long periods on the work at hand is at best an impediment, at worst a disaster.

4.
In search of greater productivity, I downloaded an ingenious application a few months back. (Note: I am not being paid to remark on its ingeniousness.) It’s called Freedom, and it turns off the Internet for however many minutes you specify, up to eight hours. It costs ten dollars. Turning the Internet back on once you’ve launched the program requires restarting your computer, which is both such a colossal hassle (ask me how many Word documents I have open at the moment) and such an admission of weakness (what, you couldn’t go 120 minutes without checking your email?) that I’ve never done it.

At first when I turned off the Internet, I would automatically drift into Twitter or Gmail or CNN anyway. The familiar pattern: I would be working and then I would switch tasks almost without realizing what I was doing and find myself staring at a browser window or at Tweetdeck. It would take a moment to remember that I was actually offline.

I’ve been trying to retrain myself. A few months after downloading Freedom, I’ve noticed a change. I’m much more productive than I was a few months ago. I can write for longer periods now, uninterrupted. Sometimes even when I’m not running the application, when the bright lights of the Internet are available at my fingertips.

When you flush the toilet, do you know where your shit goes? Sure, in most cities, it flows into the main sewer system until it reaches a waste-water treatment plant somewhere on the outskirts of town. But then what happens to it? Do you have any idea? If your first response is, “Ask somebody who cares,” then you need to read David Waltner-Toews’sThe Origin of Feces. Now.

Despite its goofball title and jokey tone, The Origin of Feces is a deeply serious work of environmental science that strives to do for how we think about shit what Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan have done for how we think about what we eat. In just more than 200 breezy, gag-filled pages, Waltner-Toews argues that by crowding people into cities and animals onto factory farms we have turned shit from a vital part of a healthy ecosystem into a toxic waste that must be managed. “We are taking a brilliantly complex diversity of animal, plant, and bacterial species,” he writes, “and transforming them into a disordered mess of bacteria and nutrients. We are transforming a wonderful complex planet into piles of shit.”

Unlike journalists such as Schlosser, Pollan, and Malcolm Gladwell who have led the charge in recent years to popularize abstruse scientific findings for lay readers, Waltner-Toews is himself a veterinarian and epidemiologist who teaches population medicine at the University of Guelph, near Toronto. Unfortunately for American readers, Waltner-Toews is also a Canadian whose new book is published by an independent Canadian publisher, ECW Press, which means The Origin of Feces will have nowhere near the public profile of a new Gladwell or Pollan tome.

This is a crying shame. I cannot think of a more necessary work of popular science since Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which together pulled back the curtain from the American agricultural-industrial food complex and helped kick the slow-food movement into gear. In some ways, though, those books had an easier time of it. While industrial feedlots and food processing plants may be largely invisible to most consumers, we eat the results of this industrial approach to food, which in a lot of cases tastes pretty awful. You don’t have to be an organic farming purist to be willing to pay a little extra to buy whole foods that taste better and, by extension, do slightly less damage to the planet.

No matter how pure your eating habits, however, your shit still stinks, and unless you are living in a yurt in the wilderness, it still gets flushed into the same sewage-treatment system that everybody else uses. Like so many of the systems that undergird a modern industrial society, waste management is opaque to everyone outside a tiny coterie of specialists — until, of course, there is an outbreak of food-borne illness or a fish-killing algae bloom caused by agricultural runoff, in which case we run around looking for villains, who are almost by definition not ourselves.

Waltner-Toews aims to tear down the mental wall we have built between ourselves and our crap and show us that what we excrete is not simply toxic sludge, but an essential, nutrient-rich link in the life cycle of our planet. To do this, he says, we must first find a good way to talk about shit. Early on, Waltner-Toews takes his reader on a whirlwind tour through the etymology of dozens of terms we use to describe what comes out of our asses, from the profane (“shit” and “crap”) to the euphemistic (“poop” and “BM”) to the technical (“biosolids” and “fecula”). This chapter is hilarious and often enlightening. Who knew that “excrement” comes from the Latin word excernere, “to sift,” or that the Middle English word “crap” found a place in the modern lexicon in part by its association with Thomas Crapper, who popularized the use of the flush toilet?

But here as elsewhere in the book, Waltner-Toews’s purpose is deadly serious. The way we talk about shit, he points out, lays bare the way we think about this basic byproduct of human life — which is that, most of the time, we’d rather not think about it at all. Shit embarrasses us. It’s dirty and smelly, and in colloquial language it is the go-to term for everything from outrageous lies (“bullshit”) to illegal drugs (“really good shit”) and worthlessness (“a piece of shit”). But when we are forced to think about its real-world consequences, we quickly retreat to vague technical terms like “biosolids” that have the advantage of not having any real meaning to most people.

This matters, Waltner-Toews argues:
We can use precise technical terms when we want the engineers to devise a solution to a specific organic agricultural or urban waste problem…In so doing, however, we alienate the public, who are suspicious of words like biosolids. This public will need to pay for the filtration and treatment plants. They suspect that the solution to chicken shit in the water might not be a better filtration plant, but they don’t have the language to imagine and discuss what the alternatives might be.

Waltner-Toews spends the rest of the book giving his reader the language, and the knowledge, to begin imagining alternatives to our present industrially engineered solutions to our quickly multiplying waste problems. His central point is that in a healthy, bio-diverse ecosystem, shit is neither waste nor a problem. For millions of years, animals have been eating plants and other animals and shitting out whatever their bodies couldn’t use, in the process distributing seeds that have allowed stationary plants to spread and providing nutrients to fertilize the soil and feed billions of insects and smaller organisms.

But by concentrating people and the animals we eat into increasingly industrialized spaces, we have severed the vital link between shit and the natural biological processes that have been cleaning it up and re-using it for as long as there has been life on our planet. One result is pollution, which, as Waltner-Toews suggests, is just a word we use to describe what happens when a substance — carbon dioxide, say, or pig shit– gets concentrated in one place faster than the natural systems can recycle it. Another outcome is a rise in food-borne illnesses like salmonella and E. coli, most of which are caused by animal or human shit finding its way into our food. The separation of people and animals from the surrounding biosphere also contributes to broader systemic imbalances that lead to problems like extinction of species that depend on healthy ecosystems, famines resulting from nutrient-starved soils, and widespread use of petroleum-based fertilizers designed in part to make up for the lack of natural shit-based fertilizer.

The problem of shit, Waltner-Toews says, is a classic “wicked problem,” meaning a problem that can’t be solved by straightforward science and engineering without creating a whole set of new problems. We can, for instance, pump pig shit into vast manure lagoons and pump the animals themselves full of antibiotics that help them avoid diseases derived from eating shit, but ultimately the toxic brew in those manure lagoons has to go somewhere and antibiotics have a nasty habit of creating antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

The Origin of Feces is better at describing the wickedness of this problem than at articulating solutions, which get high-falutin’ and improbable in a hurry. Drawing on the work of scientists who see the complex interactions in natural ecosystems as “panarchy,” and quoting the philosopher Arthur Koestler, who saw each living thing as a whole unto itself and also a part of something larger, which together he called a “holon,” Waltner-Toews uses the term “holonocracy,” which he says “embodies a way of interpreting nested social and ecological changes and implies a new way to think about management and governance based on those observations.”

Yeah, I know. I didn’t really follow that, either. In later pages, Waltner-Toews thankfully returns to plain English and argues that the problem of shit is merely a particularly unpleasant manifestation of the more generally unsustainable nature of our industrial age, which has created “too much shit in the world, in all the wrong places.” He details some nifty small-scale solutions involving the repurposing energy-rich shit into fuel or animal feed. But at the macro-level, he seems to be saying that a comprehensive, systemic problem of this kind demands an equally comprehensive, systemic solution, which, if I am reading him right, means seriously rethinking industrialized agriculture and urbanized population. Which — call me crazy — I don’t see happening anytime soon.

But of course the very difficulty Waltner-Toews has explaining his solutions for a non-specialist audience underscores the fundamental wickedness of the problem. The Origins of Feces is a genial book, and often a kick to read, but I put it down thinking two things: 1. I will never look at shit the same way again; and 2. We are in deep shit. That Waltner-Toews, clearly one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to this issue, cannot explain a solution in terms I can understand makes me think we are in even deeper shit than he claims.

15 comments:

Great piece. I have a theory–or maybe more just a fantasy–that in the not-too-distant future many people will find themselves returning to novels (in both electronic and paper form) precisely because they’ll feel the need to develop the pleasures of longer, fuller concentration on a single task. I have three young children–a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old and a newborn–and I think a similar fragmentation happens when kids come along. Especially with babies, you find it hard to spend hours on a book, and many of my friends with kids have felt that it would never change, never improve. Most of them, though, not only got back to reading fairly soon but began to crave sustained reading periods in a way that they hadn’t before. So I’m trying to believe that the Internet will have a similar effect, eventually turning people back to books with a greater appreciation of the luxury of spending time on them. While this obviously won’t be true of everyone, I think it might be true of a fairly large percentage of people over time.

I wonder how much of this constant multitasking and automatic lure of the internet is affected by life in the office as well. The 9-5 trapped at a desk, behind a computer sort of office life. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a couple tabs on a web browser open for slower moments at work. But as we aren’t really supposed to be browsing, so there’s a constant back and forth, flipping between tasks.

I’ve had similar issues, but Freedom would not be the solution for me. My work (both school and freelance) requires access to certain sites, for research and fact-checking. What I’ve started using is called LeechBlock (http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html). It allows you to block access to just certain sites, and the number of hoops you must jump through to unlock it during the set “dark” hours are variable — right up to making you guess a random password, depending on your degree of naughtiness. At least when I stray now, I do something worthwhile, like taking a walk.

What a great read. I have gone through very similar struggles. A great read I recommend on this topic is The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge. It made me think and question in similar fashion the malleability of the brain. I used to be an obsessed iPhone user glued to the phone constantly checking and checking emails, websites and more. I have had long problems reading books, completing tasks, and being able to concentrate. After reading several papers, listening to several discussions and reading The Brain that Changes Itself I opted out to find a solution re-train my brain, re-map the cells and increase my ability to concentrate more so I did two things.

1. I restricted my use of the Internet to 1 hour every 5 hours, to start. I timed myself that I will try to do everything I needed to do within an hour even if I hadn’t finished what I needed to do. At first it was difficult to keep it up. Without even watching the time I’d go for 2 or 3 hours before realizing the time to shut the Internet off was up. I set an alarm and focused on checklist of things I needed to do using the Internet. Instead of reading articles online I would copy them to a notepad file and read them while I had turned off the wi-fi. After 3 weeks of consistent use of the restricted time on the computer I went from 1 hour per 5 hours to 1 hour a day. So, in a mere 1 hour I realized I could everything I needed to do before I would need to check emails, sites and more again.

2. After 3 years of intense iPhone use, I quit the iPhone. Instead, I picked up the most anti-user friendly phone I could possibly find, so much that I would not check it every 30 seconds. Since, that move, 2 months ago, I have completed reading 15 books.

In the past 3 years I have been consumed so much by the Internet that I almost feel that I was addicted and had an obsessive disorder, including ADD. However, after repetitive re-training of my brain I think I was able to pick up a novel and read it without being interrupted to check emails. I convinced my brain that these things can wait.

I think my brain is now obsessing about receiving information from books and newspapers than using iPhones and computers. Perhaps, this is a positive addiction or obsession.

Thank you for sharing all the great info. And I am glad freedom is working for you. However, I think you can do it without software. I almost feel like the freedom software acts like a drug. Be careful as it may backfire and map your brain to be dependent on the software for you to be able to use the Internet, just like a drug would do. Do it on your own! :-)

I think K. Frazier might be onto something with his/her comment. I just started reading Carr’s book and actually wanted to tell Carr, “Hey, I’ve been where you are, but now I’m craving reading books again.” I’m feeling that much of what I find on the Internet is too shallow for me to want to spend time on. And maybe that’s the point too. Maybe we don’t spend much time reading on the Web precisely because most of what we find on the Web isn’t worthy of our time. It could also be that because there is so much information so easily within our reach, that we feel rushed to get through it all, of course knowing we’ll never reach the “end” of the Web. It’s an impatience that is bred from the necessity of the medium. Too much information so let’s hurry up and get through it, and too little oversight on the quality of what’s on Web pages so we don’t enjoy spending time on it.

Amy Grace Loyd, the executive editor of Byliner and a former fiction and literary editor at Playboy, has edited some of the best writers of our time. She’s developed her own confident and refined style of storytelling and shows it in her sensuous debut novel, The Affairs of Others. In expansive and precise language, Loyd explores the rhythms and sensations of human arrangements and exposes layers of time, grief, and love in contemporary urban life. Lloyd’s writing often takes its time. She wants the reader to pause and savor her notes that city rain has a “mineral” smell or sorrow has a “peculiar altitude.”

Loyd’s real success is evident in two areas: sex and the city. She reconstructs the moods of post-9/11 New York, most especially in her narrator, Celia Cassill. Reflecting the recent history of her city, Celia is a bruised and barricaded young widow who has created spaces that she can carefully control. She keeps herself physically and emotionally apart from others, and remains anchored in an ongoing mourning for the past and her husband.

Loyd is expert in describing Celia’s trampled and tentative Brooklyn neighborhood. She conjures the streets, sidewalks, and the subway of the city as places that both connect and separate people simultaneously. She communicates precisely how wide streets, like Atlantic Avenue, form divisions between neighborhoods as well as demarcating the past from the present in people’s minds.

Loyd creates a microcosm of the city landscape in Celia’s apartment building. Celia is the landlady — at once connected to her tenants and deliberately set apart from them, at once living in the past and yet occasionally tugged into the present.

While Celia’s husband has been dead for five years, she has not gotten over the loss, and actually doesn’t see anything wrong with remaining immersed in her past. Her husband left her enough money for her to buy a building and become a landlady to a small, carefully selected group of tenants. She has rules and routines, carefully guarded and prescribed interactions with her neighbors, and a respect for the privacy of others she offers in exchange for them respecting her boundaries. Celia keeps to herself and her memories, and Loyd is careful to reflect this behavior in other city dwellers who experience life along the same lines — connected and apart, present and distant.

But there’s always an inciting incident in city life — and novels — to shake up a comfort zone and ignite change. Loyd introduces the charismatic Hope into Celia’s static world, and the walls come tumbling down. Subletting from a trusted tenant, Hope moves into Celia’s building, and triggers a progression of events that break down barriers among the fragile occupants. The elderly tenant on the top floor goes missing. The married couple on the floor below him begin fighting and separate. Hope is on the run from a failed marriage and begins a sexually violent affair with a hulking troubled lover. And Celia herself is disturbed by the stirrings of desire and violence in the rooms above that force her to confront the limitations of her serene isolation, and how she has been navigating her life.

Celia is pulled out of her orderly stasis and yanked into the connected lives of her tenants. Loyd has her narrator break bad in some surprising ways. Soon Celia is exchanging violent slaps with the adult daughter of her missing tenant; eavesdropping on the unmistakable sounds of Hope being bent over a table by her dominating lover; knocking out a man with a golf club; violating privacy in every way imaginable by invading her tenants’ apartments and snooping through their pockets, diaries, and beds. Celia’s journey is a wonderfully disturbing and satisfying passage through mourning and toward rejoining the world.

Loyd describes urban characters and urban places as codependent entities, extensions of each other. Sometimes bodies become places — which brings us to how Loyd writes about the erotic vibrations in her characters.

This writer gives good sex. Loyd avoids the pitfalls of bad sex writing almost assuredly because she avoids describing body parts — this seems to be the key. (She does falter once and it jars — but then the reader plunges back in.) The Affairs of Others isn’t an instance of what a dirty-book-weary friend mockingly calls “sexual fiction,” it’s a triumph of describing what is sensed and experienced during sex rather than what is performed or penetrated in the sex act. Celia experiences sex — when she engages in or overhears it — much like she experiences her city, as both threat and connection, distance and intimacy. It’s a way for her to violate her own privacy — whether she’s eavesdropping on Hope and her lover or starting an affair herself that may bring her back into the present world.

The Affairs of Others captures the moods of a tired city and of a mourning widow, both reluctant to find renewal. Loyd often deploys the noirish tones of a mystery novel in the search for the missing tenant, various violent confrontations, and several visits from a police detective — and this is the right mood for her narrator’s journey. In true cherchez la femme-mode, Loyd places a woman at the source of all that has been disturbed in her narrator’s life, but it’s not only Hope the interloper who has forced Celia to break down her carefully built boundaries — it’s Celia’s own human desire to be alive to the possibilities of being part of the lives of others.